Sunday, February 02, 2014

Supreme Court Opens Girl's Room to Men in Maine

Overturning a lower court, the Supreme Court of Maine has ruled that any male student may choose to use the girl's locker/restroom, from grade school through college. The attorney for the Orono school district, the defendant in the lawsuit, welcomed the defeat saying, “The court has also provided helpful guidance about how to handle this issue” -- as the school now awaits possible monetary judgement in the case against the taxpayers.

“. . . it has been clearly established that a student’s psychological well-being and educational success depend upon being permitted to use the communal bathroom consistent with her [his] gender identity, denying access to the appropriate bathroom constitutes sexual orientation discrimination in violation of the [Maine Human Rights Commission].”-- Justice Warren Silver, writing for the Supreme Court majority

The family of Nicole Maines [born Wyatt Maines, a boy] and the Maine Human Rights Commission sued after she [he] was denied access to the girls’ bathroom at her [his] elementary school in 2007.

. . . in a written ruling issued today, the Maine Supreme Court said while the school had a program in place designed to address gender identity issues, banning Maines [a male student] from the girls’ bathroom constituted discrimination.

In a 5-1 decision, the justices said that Superior Court Justice William Anderson erred when he ruled in favor of what is now Riverside RSU 26.

The incident that sparked the court case began in 2007 when a child, who was born male but identifies as female, was forced to stop using the girls bathroom at the Asa Adams Elementary School in Orono. She [he] was told to use a staff bathroom after the grandfather of a male student complained.

The justices’ questions at oral arguments in the case in June in Bangor focused on a conflict between a law passed in the 1920s that requires separate bathrooms for boys and girls in schools and the provision enacted in 2005 in the Maine Human Rights Act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The ruling is the first in which a state supreme court has affirmed a transgender person’s right to equal access to restrooms in places of public accommodation.

Lawyers representing Nicole [born Wyatt, a boy] Maines, who is now 16, said the decision could lay a foundation for other states’ courts that are facing questions about the emerging rights of people who identify as the opposite of their birth gender.

The court’s 5-1 ruling is the first interpretation of a 2005 amendment to the Maine Human Rights Act that added language protecting transgender people in schools.

The decision overturns a lower court’s ruling that sided with the school district. Arguing before the supreme court, attorneys for the district said a 1983 law requiring schools to offer sanitary bathrooms segregated by sex created a pre-emptive exception to the Maine Human Rights Act.

It is the first time the state’s highest court has interpreted amendments to the Maine Human Rights act [MHRA] that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. It also is one of those rare times when a law court decision makes law, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine.

“The Law Court made very good law here and it’s going to help not only the people involved in this case,” Zachary Heiden, Legal Director at the ACLU of Maine, said Thursday.

[Justice Andrew Mead dissented from the Supreme Court majority.] “I depart from the court’s casual dismissal of the fact that the plain language of a specific statute explicitly requires segregating school bathrooms by sex,” he wrote. “The plain language of the provisions of [the school bathroom statute] and the MHRA are in conflict, and I believe that principles of comity require us to defer to the representative branch of government to resolve the issue.”